The Politics of Vulnerability: How to Heal Muslim-Christian Relations in a Post-Christian America: Today's Threat to Religion and Religious Freedom

By Asma T. Uddin

A religious liberty lawyer and acclaimed author reveals the root of America's polarization inside the Muslim and evangelical Christian divide—and how it can be healed.

Despite the dire consequences of America's cultural, political, and religious divisiveness, from increasing incivility to discrimination and outright violence, few have been able to get to the core cause of this conflict. Even fewer have offered measures for reconcilliation. 

Now, in The Politics of Vulnerability, Asma Uddin, American-Muslim public intellectual, religious-liberties attorney, and activist, provides a unique perspective on the complex political and social factors contributing to the Muslim-Christian divide. Unlike other analysts, Uddin asks what underlying drivers cause otherwise good people to do—or believe—bad things? Why do people who value faith support of measures that limit others, especially of Muslims’, religious freedom and other rights?’ 

Uddin humanizes a contentious relationship by fully embracing both sides as individuals driven by very human fears and anxieties. Many conservative Christians fear that the Left is dismantling traditional “Christian America” to replace it with an Islamized America, a conspiratorial theory that has given rise to an “evangelical persecution complex,” a politicized vulnerability. 

Uddin reveals that Islamophobia and other aspects of the conservative Christian movement are interconnected.  Where does hate come from and how can it be conquered? Only by addressing the underlying factors of this politics of vulnerability can we begin to heal the divide. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Release date: Mar 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643136639

Asma T. Uddin

Asma T. Uddin is a religious-liberty lawyer who has worked on cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, federal appellate courts, and federal trial courts. She is the founding editor-in-chief of altmuslimah.com and was an executive producer for the Emmy and Peabody-nominated docuseries The Secret Life of Muslims. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Teen Vogue. She currently resides in Washington, DC.

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Cover: The Politics of Vulnerability, by Asma T. Uddin

Today’s Threat to Religion and Religious Freedom

The Politics of Vulnerability

How to Heal Muslim-Christian Relations in a Post-Christian America

Asma T. Uddin

The Politics of Vulnerability by Asma T. Uddin, Pegasus Books

To the black sheep in a fitting-in culture

INTRODUCTION

THE BALLROOM AT THE PIERRE Hotel in New York City was glittering that night. At various times the site of the Oscars, the Emmys, and high-fashion shows, on May 7, 2015, this room was celebrating a very different type of star: Barbara Green, the owner of the Hobby Lobby chain of crafts stores.

It was the twentieth annual Canterbury Medal gala of my then law firm, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. Spirits were buoyant, as the firm was coming fresh off its United States Supreme Court win in favor of the crafts stores. The hundreds gathered in the room that night hailed from diverse faiths: multiple Christian denominations, Jews, Sikhs, and me, the lone Muslim.

Customary for a black-tie dinner at one of New York’s exclusive venues, the dinner was extravagant—surf and turf, followed by an endless dessert buffet—and scrumptious. But unlike any other swanky dinner in the city that night, one thing was missing: alcohol. Throughout the dinner and dessert reception, wine and spirits were nowhere to be seen.

The Green family is fundamentalist Protestant. While not notably ascetic, fundamentalists consider smoking and alcohol strictly forbidden by their faith. Out of deference to the honoree that night, Becket had chosen to not serve alcohol.

It was a welcome respite for me, as my religion, too, forbids the consumption of alcohol. It hasn’t always been easy growing up in a drinking culture. Nearly all of the networking events hosted by my law school, and then the corporate firm where I started out my career, revolved around alcohol. I was the odd one out, sipping my Coke while everyone was getting more than a little tipsy (and naturally then finding the events way more fun than they actually were).

But finally, here not drinking was the norm, and people were having fun despite it. The Greens were strict about their beliefs. They didn’t even rent their company trucks out to people who wanted to use them to transport alcohol. If your faith forbids something, helping someone else do that exact thing is almost just as bad. The idea of complicity is part of many religions, mine included—not only can I not drink, I cannot buy or bring alcohol for others or even pour it for them.

Complicity was a big part of the Greens’ case at the Supreme Court. Their religious beliefs against abortion also prevented them from complying with the part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that required them to pay for four drugs in their employee health insurance that the Greens considered abortion-causing drugs. Those drugs were Plan B and Ella, the so-called morning-after pill and the week-after pill, and two IUDs. Paying for these drugs would have violated the Greens’ deeply held religious belief that life begins at the moment of conception, when an egg is fertilized.

But the ACA required the Greens to pay for these drugs on pain of penalty, and made the Greens choose between violating their conscience and paying more than a million dollars per day to the government. The Greens decided to instead bring suit to vindicate their religious rights. They put everything on the line—their entire billion-dollar business—for their religious convictions.

Their case also made the Greens some of the most reviled people in America. Many Americans thought the Greens were using their religion to oppress women. They said that Christians like the Greens threatened to make America a theocracy, a Bible nation where their religion reigned supreme over others.

SUPREME COURT’S HOBBY LOBBY DECISION IS A SLAP IN THE FACE TO WOMEN, read one prominent headline.

OF COURSE HOBBY LOBBY THINKS IT’S ABOVE THE LAW, read another.

The New Republic declared, We’re all living in Hobby Lobby’s Bible nation.

Some critics even evoked imagery from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. They claimed that with the Hobby Lobby decision, we were slouching toward Gilead, the totalitarian patriarchal theocracy (or Divine Republic) in Atwood’s book. One writer lamented,

It would actually be the best-case scenario if these attacks on reproductive freedom were chiefly about punishing women for having sex, because the alternatives are that the Supreme Court of the United States is deliberately hauling us toward a straight-up theocracy…

The court decision, as I’ll explain in the coming chapters, had little to do with theocracy or policing women’s sex lives. The court actually ensured that women still had access to the full range of contraceptives covered by the ACA mandate. So, all of the foregoing depictions were factually incorrect.

But more than that, the headlines missed an essential point: the Greens, like many religious believers, are duty bound to follow what their conscience demands, and our law guards the right of every American to fulfill those duties except in the narrowest of circumstances.

Our country’s founders made religious freedom a core constitutional right because they knew how deep religion runs for many people and that it inspires those people to do good for others. Though our country hasn’t always protected religious freedom equally and fairly for people of all religions, it’s gotten better over the years.

Well, with some religions at least. Less so with mine.

Fast-forward to another gathering of religious freedom enthusiasts, this one mostly conservative Christians and all of them on the Greens’ side in Hobby Lobby. The man at the podium was announcing to the crowd,

We do not support sharia supremacists themselves or their enablers or their apologists.

And it pains me beyond words that this program that will be coming up after the attorney general’s remarks, you have such an individual who will be presented to you, I’m afraid, as someone who is a perfect example of moderate Muslims and a perfect interlocutor for us in interfaith dialogue and bridge building and the like…

I hope that you will not be misled into believing this individual. I’ve nothing against her personally. But this individual and what she stands for—and most especially what she is doing with organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (one of the most aggressive Muslim Brotherhood front organizations in the country)—must not be endorsed, even implicitly, by this organization.

I had hoped that she would not be given a platform. She is. I trust you to listen attentively, but I hope that you will not give her yourselves a platform.

That’s Frank Gaffney Jr. speaking, the founder of the virulently anti-Muslim organization Center for Security Policy, right before he introduced a talk by US Attorney General William Barr at the National Religious Broadcasters’ NRB 2020 Christian Media Convention in February 2020.

And that ominous figure he’s describing, the sharia supremacist bogeyman? That’s me.

For the record, I am nothing of the sort. I’m not trying to impose sharia on anyone, just like the Greens weren’t trying to turn the United States into a theocracy. Gaffney wanted the audience to think that I (a woman) favor a legal regime oppressive to women—just as Barbara Green (also a woman) faced similar charges. Neither claim is true; both claims are insulting and preposterous. Even though Gaffney’s religious community is smeared with falsehoods every day, that didn’t stop him from doing the same to me.

I watched the whole thing on the TV screen set up in the green room, my mouth agape. Is this actually happening?! I thought. It was my first time at NRB and I was already feeling a bit anxious about what to expect from the crowd. My panel presentation, moderated by NRB chairman Janet Parshall, was going to take place immediately after Barr’s talk.

Dread welled up in my chest as Gaffney warned the audience to not give her yourselves a platform. Gaffney is well known as a leader of what experts have dubbed Fear, Inc., a 1.5-billion-dollar industry that strategically pumps out anti-Muslim messaging, organizes anti-Muslim protests and rallies across the nation, and drives efforts to strip American Muslims of legal rights.

What are they going to do to me? I wondered frantically. Was Gaffney rallying his troops, people who liked him and would follow his lead? Would they boo me offstage or empty out of the room—or worse? Engage in mockery, maybe violence?

As I sat paralyzed by the various imaginings of audience insurrection, Janet came running into the green room. I can’t believe he did that! This is so upsetting! Then, her expression changed from anger and alarm to genuine remorse. I am so sorry, Asma. I will fix this.

Janet came through moments later as Barr was escorted off the stage and my panel was ushered on.

[Gaffney’s comments] were ill-timed, inappropriate, and hurtful, she said, standing and looking out over the audience of several hundred. She pressed, Do I make myself clear? She then turned to me and apologized again. As she did, I could see several rows of attendees stand up and leave, as if in protest (I would later learn that my hunch was correct). But most of the audience stayed put. The people in the front row even smiled up at me warmly, and several approached me after my talk to offer their thanks and support.

Janet and I were joined onstage by Steven Waldman, author of Sacred Liberty: America’s Long, Bloody and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom, and Craig Parshall, NRB’s general counsel and Janet’s husband. Titled Many Faiths—One First Amendment, our presentation was about the need to protect religious liberty for all Americans, including Muslims. As we emphasized, the very nature of human rights, including the right to religious freedom, requires that if you protect it only for some, you cease to protect it for anyone. Because if you cede to government the power to selectively protect religions that it likes (or views as politically expedient) and not protect the ones it doesn’t like, you have given it power that it can use against any religion—including your own—at any point.

I made this the central point of my 2019 book, When Islam Is Not a Religion: Inside America’s Fight for Religious Freedom. Gaffney knew exactly why I was there and what I was going to argue. He had sought to preempt that message by insinuating that the panel, and my participation in it, was a mere front for a sinister takeover. For him, it was critical that the audience members believe they could exclude Muslims from the American fabric even as they tried to protect their own place in it. My co-panelists and I squarely rejected that notion.

Gaffney had good reason to think his message would go unchallenged. It is not uncommon for speakers at large conservative gatherings to bash Islam and American Muslims with zero resistance from the crowd. Gaffney himself makes the rounds regularly, delivering dire warnings about Islam and Muslims at the Western Conservative Summit, Values Voter Summit, and elsewhere. In July 2019, John Andrews, founder of the Western Conservative Summit and a former Colorado Senate president, stood on the Summit stage, under a banner proclaiming the importance of religious liberty, and said, The simplistic approach of simply granting unconditional ‘freedom of religion’ to a religion that doesn’t believe in freedom—and never doubt me, Islam does not—that approach is civilizational suicide, friends. In 2016, Michael Flynn, who would become national security adviser for twenty-two days in 2017, said in a conference address that Islam is a political ideology that hides behind the notion of it being a religion, and therefore Muslims should not be afforded rights to religious freedom. Several others, including numerous state lawmakers, made similar claims in official press releases and other public statements and continue to do so with their constituents’ approval.

What made NRB different from these other conservative gatherings where Muslims are attacked with zero pushback? Consider that the string of events at the NRB convention—Gaffney’s comments, Janet Parshall’s rebuttal, and the opportunity for the audience to take away an important message about coherence and rights for all Americans—only happened because my presence at the convention forced it. And in so doing, I helped reveal an internal fissure among conservative Christians that might not otherwise have been apparent.

The dynamics between the Gaffney constituency and the Parshall constituency in the conservative Christian audience show that often what we perceive as black-and-white isn’t necessarily so. Even if everyone in that audience was inclined to accept Gaffney’s divisive message, Parshall’s statement and my panel presentation disrupted that bias. And the receptiveness—indeed, the warmth—of the Parshall constituency challenged the common conception that evangelicals are unshakably anti-Muslim.

What does this moment tell us about our ideological divides and how we might go about mending them? Building from that moment, I have spent more than a year exploring it, and it forms the basis of this book. In America today, we are more polarized than we have been at any time since the Civil War. We have our in-group and our out-group, and we act against the out-group members simply because they are the out-group. Increasingly today, our political alliances do not just reflect our positions; they drive our positions. But at NRB, that trend was complicated and perhaps even subverted. Why?

And was there something about the fact that we were talking about religious freedom in particular that helped bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide?

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IN WHEN ISLAM IS NOT A RELIGION, I looked at current threats to Americans’ religious freedom through the prism of attacks on Muslims’ religious freedom. Anti-Muslim advocacy, violence, and hate crimes constitute one of the most pressing areas of discrimination in the United States right now. But by no means are these attacks a problem only for Muslims—they are a problem for all Americans.

For example, I examined the assertion (mostly coming from the political Right) that Islam is not a religion, and that therefore Muslims don’t have religious freedom. While courts can determine whether beliefs match up to the legal definition of religion, this is not what anti-Muslim opponents are concerned with. They are instead driven by more emotional concerns. Yet, if courts and legislatures are empowered to say that Islam is not a religion, they can accept the same claim about every other religious group the majority may fear. If courts start to parse Islamic doctrine in order to decide which parts are acceptable or likeable and which aren’t, as some prominent individuals want them to do, courts could conceivably parse the beliefs of every other religious group, too. Seen this way, it becomes clear how an attack that might seem relevant only to a very particular group actually tells us something deeper and more fundamental about American rights.

In The Politics of Vulnerability, I have sought to look beyond legal rights and toward political polarization. Anti-Muslim sentiment (or Islamophobia) is not just about Muslims; it is also a case study of the core elements of American political polarization, which now even dictates the cars we drive and the stores we shop at. America’s growing religious diversity—which encompasses people of a wide variety of faiths and people who define themselves as nonreligious—is a top driver of our political polarization. Fewer Americans ascribe to Christianity, while more Americans are religiously unaffiliated (the so-called nones), and there is less public confidence in organized religion. With growing secularization comes open contestation of Christianity’s dominance in American politics and culture. But there is also continued, even intensified, religiosity in a different subset of American society. The religious divide explains why some of the most divisive issues in politics today are social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. And to make it worse, the different sides are part of different political parties: in the Democratic Party, the nones outnumber Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, or members of historically black Protestant traditions, whereas conservative Christians are overwhelmingly Republican.

Given these dynamics, conservatives object to liberals publicly championing Muslims’ rights. As I explain in this book, for conservatives, Muslims are part of what political scientist Lilliana Mason calls the liberal mega-identity. Our partisan affiliations have morphed into identities, and what’s more, the identities include a host of things that have nothing to do with social policy. Now, what we eat, drive, where we live and shop, what our religion or race or sexual orientation is, are all wrapped up in our political identity. We group hybrid-driving, latte-drinking, Whole Foods-shopping Americans into the Democratic Party, and the Land Rover-driving, Cracker Barrel customer into the Republican Party.

Unfortunately, this grouping has also affected religious communities, so that Christians (mostly white and conservative) are associated with the Republican Party, and religious minorities, particularly Muslims, are associated with the Democratic Party. In this battle of ideologies, Muslims are seen by conservatives less as Muslims and more as proxies for deeper issues that represent the opposing political team or out-group. This is what Gaffney was getting at, too, when he complained about NRB giving me a platform and engaging in interfaith dialogue and bridge building and the like. He opposed my presence not just because I am Muslim but also because in having me, NRB was accommodating liberalism. (As I explain in chapter 5, his precise choice of words—especially interfaith—signaled to the audience that something ominous was afoot.) In this view, anti-Muslim hostility is central to many conservative Christians’ winning and liberals losing. And it’s not just Muslims who are used as proxies in this way; as I’ll show, evangelicals (for different reasons, with different outcomes, and by different people) have also become a political piñata.

But this phenomenon is not systemic to American society. American conservatives weren’t always hostile toward Muslims. During George W. Bush’s presidency, many Christian conservatives considered Muslims ideological allies. Even after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, public statements by Christian leaders generally refused to vilify Islam and instead talked about an alliance of orthodox believers. Pat Buchanan said in 2004 that conservative Americans have more in common with devout Muslims than with liberal Democrats. Three years later, conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza extended that theory in his book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

The Enemy at Home went on to become a New York Times bestseller. In it, D’Souza, a filmmaker, political commentator, and then scholar at the Heritage Foundation, expressed a sentiment that was and is popular among conservative Christians: the political Left is responsible for the downfall of American morality and, correspondingly, for its greatest tragedies. Of 9/11, he says Osama bin Laden attacked America not because of its foreign policy but because the American cultural and political Left has fostered a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies; the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities, are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. For D’Souza, terrorism is the logical outcome of the scandalous sexual mores that [Muslims] see in American movies and television, as well as the sight of hundreds of homosexuals kissing one another and taking marriage vows.

As political science professor Alan Wolfe [sarcastically] described D’Souza’s message: America is fighting two wars simultaneously… a war against terror abroad and a culture war at home. We should be using the former, less important, one to fight the latter, really crucial, one. The way to do so is to encourage a split between ‘radical’ Muslims like bin Laden, who engage in jihad, and ‘traditional’ Muslims who are conservative in their political views and deeply devout in their religious practices. (D’Souza’s premise is of course false: many religiously devout Muslims, like many devout Christians, are liberal in their political views.)

D’Souza was arguing this in 2007, but the message preceded 9/11 and endured in its direct aftermath. Two days after the attack, on September 13, 2001, white evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Sr. stated on national television, I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way… I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’ He said this on The 700 Club, a show hosted by televangelist Pat Robertson, and Robertson agreed: Jerry, that’s my feeling, and Well, I totally concur. Granted, these same commentators blame liberals for every other tragedy, too—natural disasters included—but the relevant point here is that they chose to blame the Left for 9/11 while trying to find common cause with American Muslims.

So, conservatives in the era of Islamophilia admired Islam’s traditional sexual mores and thought of Muslims as allies against the threatening forces of the libertine left. And for a while, the love appeared to be reciprocal. In 1992, American Muslims voted two to one for George H. W. Bush, and even though they supported Bill Clinton in 1996, in 2000, more than 70 percent of Muslims voted for George W. Bush on the premise that Republicans were natural allies on matters of faith and morality.

But then, driven by foreign policy concerns like the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, most Muslims switched teams: More than 90 percent of Muslim-Americans voted for John Kerry in 2004, 89 percent voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and 85 percent voted for him in 2014. In 2016, 75.9 percent of Muslims voted for Hillary Clinton and in 2020, 69 percent voted for Joe Biden. Even though American Muslims’ positions on social issues still lean conservative, they’re now more likely to prioritize civil rights and public policy above symbolic debates over private morality. Democrats, for their part, have welcomed Muslims into their ranks and have defended Muslims’ rights vigorously.

And as this is happening, so is the widening divide between religious and secular Americans, with the latter associated with Democrats. Taken together, this means that the Muslims now allied with Democrats cannot benefit from the efforts of the Christian Right to defend religious liberty, because conservatives identify religious values as Christian values.

I didn’t understand the full implication of this finding until recently. And that is: whether you believe that Muslims have fundamental human rights (like religious freedom) depends on your political tribe. This startling realization prompted me to dig deeper.

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MY GOAL WITH this book is not just to diagnose the problem that arises in denying Muslims fundamental human rights—I also propose a possible solution. I seek to show how constitutional law and the public discourse of religious freedom are central to that solution.

But the messenger also matters. Even Gaffney acknowledged this when he warned the audience about me: [A]n individual who will be presented to you, I’m afraid, as someone who is a perfect example of moderate Muslims and a perfect interlocutor for us in interfaith dialogue and bridge building and the like.

Why am I the perfect interlocutor? Because I see the divide between conservative Christians and Muslims as bridgeable. I see at least a particular subset of the opponents as persuadable. Those are people who are driven by fundamentally human concerns, and it is on the basis of this shared humanity that I work with them.

This understanding stems from my professional and personal experiences. I am a lawyer specializing in religious freedom on behalf of people of all religions: A to Z, Amish to Zoroastrian. I learned a tremendous amount through my efforts, not just about theology or the law but what our constitutional rights are fundamentally about. I came to understand that religious liberty is central to our autonomy because it helps us stay true to our quests for purpose and meaning in our lives.

That philosophical basis of religious freedom, the view that centers on the person who is trying to live according to his or her deepest beliefs, really comes in handy